When I homeschooled my daughter, each subject was taught everyday. English was very hard for her when it came to diagramming a sentence as public school had abandoned it years ago and she’d never seen it done. We reviewed yesterdays lesson in each subject then moved on to the new lesson.
While I didn’t home school, I taught for a while at a church school that had a large portion of homeschoolers come in for certain subjects. It was broken in to block periods where students would study in periods. 1st period English, 2 period Science, etc. I talked to a lot of the moms and they would break the learning day into periods and spread the subjects out evenly.
I frequently let the kids decide. They often chose to blast through days or weeks of lessons when it was interesting or just easy reading. They were grades ahead in Literature and History.
Math required more discipline and then KhanAcademy was invented and boom shakalaka, math got way better for me and the kids. The younges and most math phobic now works in a bank doing math every day. The others are a nurse, a microbiologist and a mechanic (co owns his own shop). They all went to college, the mechanic went to a Bible College and runs the tech team at church.
Most humans prefer some type of predictable schedule, and children are no different.
Math, history, geography, English, arts, science - pretty-much same time-frame each day. Broken up with plenty of breaks.
And field trips, and usually one or two co-op days a week.
Then it's back into their cages in the trailer....
ARTH ping to help out a fellow FReeper!
Both. That’s the beauty of it. There’s majors and there’s minors. Keep at some things every day, others not. Focus on what’s important and don’t waste time diagramming sentences. Learn to translate into English from any language you like.
We homeschooled our kids and one of the big takeaways for me was how much more efficient it is. Public schools have a lot of wasted time built in to their program. We were always done well before 3:00 pm.
Plus, we didn’t have all these breaks so a lot of times the school year was over in April.
We have the kids on a couple different curriculums depending on what they’re studying. Like the younger kids we have them on a mix of Abeka and Sonlight studies and the older kids get David Barton’s Wall Builders studies for history. We also let each of them have an elective course of study like animal husbandry, mechanical engineering, geology, and etc.
They get about five to six hours of study five days a week (more if it’s snowing).
So far we’ve sent one to Hillsdale College so we must be doing something right.
It changes, depending on the skill level and educational track. At first, learning Latin is done one-on-one with the parent. That’s a larger time block. But after year two, it’s all independent, at about 20 minutes per day until a test week. For example, when it’s time to take an AP test, everything gets dropped till the test is done.
I tried to follow a school day schedule when first starting out. But then you get finished quickly and can get through the lessons in the morning. As time went on, we just did a lesson a day per subject, more if interested.
As the kids become more autonomous, I just did lesson plans for the week and they went through them as fast or slow as desired. Once high school hit, it does change because by then we were doing more co-op learning.
Some people do home school all year long, but I loved that summer break lol.
1. Decide how much you want to cover for the year ahead. I used Saxon Math. I wanted to finish one math book every school year.
2. Figure out how many school days you will reasonably have (I had about 170 figuring in some sick days and some field trip days)
3. Figure out how much you need to do per day to get the book done. It was easy with Saxon as it really was one lesson a day.
4. Schedule your school days. Ours were M-F. Every day, there was a lesson of Saxon Math. Whether it took 20 minutes or an hour and a half - get the lesson done.
5. At the halfway point in the school year, assess where you are in each curriculum. If you are ahead, ok, do math four days a year. Behind? Add two weeks of summer school or every other Saturday.
6. You are homeschooling. Adjust as needed. If math is agonizing torture is it necessary to get the whole book done in a year? Talk with your kid and let him know you see his struggles and will be reasonable. Perhaps set a timer and once he has pecked away for 45 minutes he can be done. Perhaps Wednesdays he can have off. Conversely if he is breezing through you could have add ons like a trig course or programming or architecture or robot competitions or other math expansion.
Also, don’t be so rigid that if the whole neighborhood is having a water balloon fight he has to stay in and do math still. Let them live a little.
I practice what I learned in the old VHS series “where there’s a will, there’s an A”
I break up lessons quite often and allow for breaks. I can tell when she’s absorbing or not.
I also break up into gym days. Well go to the pool, do archery, climb, bike or run and hike.
Oh, I also do “Smarty parties” where I’ll decorate the house and bake and have some little party when she excels at a subject.
Never homeschooled, but I know math and math education. Have them doing math regularly. Some every day is better than once a week in a block or whatever. Nice part about homeschool is that they can do it at their own pace. If something is more difficult, slow down and master it. If something is easy, move on. But do it regularly and make sure there are no gaps in knowledge.
You have to teach the basics. But I would let them lean into what interests them.
we found a Christian curriculum that provided bi-weekly work books in each subject with quizzes at the end of each section. i like it because the information is organized like a traditional textbook, but broken into bite size pieces where your child is required to participate on each page by filling it out. our children could then pace themselves, usually getting to an exam proctored by us at two week periods in each subject. of course there’s more to it than that with some practical things like labs, etc. but that’s it in a nutshell.
We used what was called a unit approach. When our daughter was fired up and on a roll in a particular field, we would let her run with it. Not to the total exclusion of other things, but her enthusiasm was the determining factor.
We were also not highly regimented. She went to public high school, graduated at 16, Deans list first semester of college. So we figure our approach was a good one.
There’s a LOT more to it than that of course. Everything was a learning experience as opposed to all classroom instruction.
12 years of government schools would have destroyed a beautiful, bright, inquiring mind. Couldn’t let that happen.
Rotation is needed.
The brain runs on chemicals. Certain parts of the brain do certain things. When the supply of learning chemicals in a brain area runs low, learning in that area stops. The brain might even dissolve recently set learning links if a brain area is overused.
College classes in a subject are normally about 50 minutes long. Avoid focusing on something for any longer.
The brain is not a computer with a 512GB solid state drive. Don’t try to overstuff it.
Repetition is needed.
Material should be reviewed in about two weeks (and several months and several years) to fortify the learning links made.
Mental stress blocks learning nearly completely. Do physical exercise before and in between lessons.
Make learning non-stressful. Lessons should be clearly understandable.
Find your state’s accreditation requirements.
Find your curriculum. There’s a ton of options.
Break it down incrementally on the calendar.
Be firm, loving, disciplined, fun, flexible and organized.
Keep records.
Don’t be like the home school families who say that they’re home schooling, but they’re actually just raising feral low performers.
Homeschooled 2 of 3 kids & now helping to homeschool grandkids.
We go with a combination of formal learning & delight-directed unschooling.
Math, English, Initial Reading & Spelling with workbooks & aimed for every day. Science, History, Social Studies/Civics more focused on what their interests were at the time & less scheduled.
Our schooldays usually ended shortly after lunch. Many outside & informal things can be counted as “school”, as mentioned above.
Did not usually do number or letter grades, just went over mistakes until understood, with a lot of reinforcement & encouragement.